Inspired By: Caroline Coon
Jamie Clifton
Tue Oct 15 2024
At Miista, we’re inspired by people who do the opposite thing – the pioneers who take risks, challenge conventions and encourage bold decisions.
In our Inspired By series, we showcase the stories of these individuals, whose attitudes embody everything we celebrate in our designs and production process.
Caroline Coon is standing in the dressing room of her West London home, opposite a giant portrait of Circe.
In Greek mythology, the powerful sorceress lured visitors onto her island and transformed anyone who wronged her into an animal.
In Caroline’s painting, she stands nude, arms aloft like Jesus on the cross, with pigs scurrying around her feet.
“I painted this in the late-70s, when we called the men who were frustrating women’s liberation ‘male chauvinist pigs’,” she says, pointing to the canvas.
“This is Circe, nakedly honest. But there’s also the element of crucifixion, because any woman who contradicts the patriarchy is going to be crucified in the public domain.”
While she might be making a wider point, Caroline is also speaking from experience. Raised by an upper-class family in a society that would have preferred her to pipe down and blend in, she did the exact opposite.
Now 79 years old, she has dedicated her entire adult life to championing women’s rights, social justice and the politics of sexual liberation.
In 1967 she co-founded the pioneering drug charity Release to challenge the systemic racism and classism of drug policing.
The media of the time weren't particularly keen on Release's progressive attitude towards drugs, but they set the standard for how the majority of experts now view the topic, and live on as the oldest independent drugs charity in the world.
In the late-1970s and early-80s Caroline documented the radical spirit of punk, as a journalist and photographer, and during the two years she spent managing The Clash. Her work celebrated the very first days of the scene, but also interrogated the attitudes held by some of punk's loudest figures when it came to gender and sexuality.
Throughout it all, she has consistently used her paintings to confront patriarchal narratives and critique the limitations of prescribed gender roles.
Caroline in 1969.
“I wouldn't have a life without challenging the status quo,” she says, lacing up a pair of black leather shoes. “Everything I am today – the freedom I have – is because of how hard we fought for democracy and freedom of speech.”
We head downstairs into Caroline’s studio, which is full of her colourful paintings and vast collection of books. She has something for everyone in here, whether you’re looking to brush up on Albert Camus, explore the history of surrealist art, or get stuck into ‘The Cunt Colouring Book’, an iconic feminist publication designed by Tee Corinne to celebrate the female anatomy.
Standing in front of a half-completed floral painting, Caroline starts talking about punk. “Punk women really defined what women could look like in public,” she says.
“They went from being stereotypically feminine, to what was considered ugly by the patriarchy and the mainstream. The fact women now can have spiky hair or wear bovver boots… this melange of masculine and feminine – that was really defined by women in the punk era, and it stuck.”
Caroline had been a visible figure in London’s hippy scene, and as that era petered out she started reflecting on what the next big youth movement might be.
Click her painting to discover more
“I kind of predicted that, after peace and love, it was going to be angry,” she says.
A series of photos she shot of The Clash – which became the cover of their first single – perfectly encapsulate this transformation.
“Back then, you’d see kids all the time with their hands above their heads, being stopped and searched by the police,” she says. “So Joe Strummer stood up for me and turned to the wall. On the back of Joe's boiler suit were the words ‘HATE AND WAR’. So there, I saw peace and love develop into hate and war, proving my thesis.”
“But remember,” she continues, “Photography was just a job. That whole time, I was really trying to paint.”
Caroline as a child, at ballet school.
Caroline’s artistic journey began with a childhood fixation on the sepia print above her parents’ fireplace. The image depicted the Annunciation, the moment the archangel Gabriel tells Mary she’ll bear a son through Immaculate Conception. “Although I don’t believe there's such a thing as a virgin birth, I recognized the power of iconography,” she says. “So at a very early age, I knew I’d use my paintings to tell an alternative story.”
Aged five, Caroline was shipped off to a Russian ballet school in the British countryside, where she was surrounded by women who “were the antithesis of my parents”, who earned their living being creative. She felt safe and supported, and learned the value of working hard, failing and trying again, until you achieve what you set out to do.
“The teachers would point to pictures of them as great ballerinas dancing at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow,” she says. “So we had a good idea of what hard work can lead to.”
This lesson clearly made its mark. At 16, Caroline’s parents wanted her to marry rich and start a family, but she was intent on continuing her studies. Without parental support, she needed a higher education grant, which required four years of tax returns to prove she was making a living independently.
So, she moved to London and put in the work. “I’m not complaining,” she says. “If you're struggling for something you want to do, you don't notice it.”
Caroline’s stint at Central Saint Martins came in the middle of the hippy era, when young people began organising DIY groups and movements to confront the moralistic establishment of the time. In 1965, a lover of Caroline’s was jailed for the possession of a tiny amount of weed, which sowed the seed for the organisation she would go on to create.
“He was also [jailed] for a gun, but that’s another matter,” she says, trailing off, before catching herself. “As a matter of fact, he got nine months for possession of a gun, three years for possession of a minute amount of cannabis.”
From that point onwards, Caroline began advocating for the decriminalisation of drug use, calling for a harm reduction model over prohibition.
In June of 1967, while protesting the media coverage of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ arrest for drug possession, she met a fellow art student named Rufus Harris. Together, they formed Release, to help young people understand their rights, and to provide legal assistance to those who needed it.
“It was predominantly working class young people being sent to prison [for drug offences], because they couldn’t afford lawyers,” Caroline explains. “So the highest high was when we could stop that. Still, today, seeing young people being sent to prison for nonviolent drug offences makes my heart bleed.”
While Release had a few celebrity benefactors – John Lennon and George Harrison among them – that wasn’t enough to keep the lights on, so Caroline started working as a freelance music journalist.
Caroline at the Release office in 1969.
Caroline on tour with The Clash in 1979.
She’s full of stories about the era’s biggest musical icons. The evening she went to interview Elton John and ended up lying on the floor with him, listening to records from new artists. The time Yoko Ono gave her Phyllis Chesler's pioneering book 'Women and Madness', which showed how the male-dominated psychiatry field of the time damaged women.
Or when she asked Kraftwerk about being the sons of the Nazi generation, and they told her they were creating “the new culture of Germany”.
But it’s her work from the punk scene that’s arguably been the most enduring. She was there from the very beginning, and photographed everyone from The Clash, The Slits and The Sex Pistols to The Buzzcocks, Poly Styrene and Siouxsie Sioux. She was at the Pistols' second ever gig, and covered the UK's first ever punk festival – at The 100 Club on Oxford Street – in 1976.
Caroline in 1978, during the punk years.
“Here’s a story about how useful it is to set up your own activist organisation,” she laughs.
“I was arrested with Sid Vicious while covering the first ever punk festival and taken off to the police station. Sitting in my cell, worrying about what my editor would say, there’s a knock at my door. Ten years after founding this organisation – which I wasn’t working for anymore – someone from Release had come to bail me out, and I was able to rush back to the festival and carry on writing.”
Caroline met The Clash during these early years, which gave her a deep understanding of what they were all about.
“So actually, it was quite easy for me to become their temporary manager,” she says of the time she spent with the band, from 1978 to 1980, which included their first ever US tour. "Thanks to ballet school I'd also been on the road as a child, driving from theatre to theatre. So, you know, it all came back around."
Throughout her time in music, Caroline always maintained her true passion: painting. Her distinctive figurative work has focused on various subjects over the years: scenes from her local area – Notting Hill Carnival, or mornings on the Harrow Road – through florals, self-portraits and male nudes. But it’s her ongoing ‘Brothel Series’ that we get talking about in detail.
Inspired partly by her own time as a sex worker in the 1980s, the series depicts the sex industry through a feminist lens.
“Men have created this system where they can use, on the whole, working class women as human condoms,” she says. “She’s ‘just a whore’, and you dispose of her, which means this is a kind of woman who’s more vulnerable than any ‘respectable’ woman. So we're living in a society which encourages this huge divide.”
Caroline’s brothel paintings are emblematic of her lifelong fight for women’s autonomy and equality. While much progress has been made, she notes, there’s still more to go – and she mentions the overturning of Roe V Wade in 2022 as an example of how quickly one’s freedoms can be taken away.
“That’s why it’s so important to always confront the status quo,” she says. “And that’s a challenge the younger generation now has to face.”
Having faced plenty of challenges of her own – always pushing against the boundaries imposed on her, and highlighting injustices that need our attention – I wonder what Caroline is proudest of in all her years of art and activism.
Before we leave, she takes us to a nearby community garden in Ladbroke Grove, and as we walk along the shadow of the Westway I ask her to reflect on everything she’s achieved over the past 60 years.
“If I’ve made any contribution at all,” she says, “it’s because, as Alice Walker said, ‘Activism is my rent for living on the planet.’ So if I’ve contributed a little bit, I’ll be very happy.”
You can watch the short documentary we made with Caroline on the Miista Instagram.
